Holy Roman Empire 1300–1650

Abstract

Between the High Middle Ages and 1806, much of Central Europe was encompassed by an entity called the Holy Roman Empire (Heiliges Römisches Reich in the German spoken by most of its inhabitants). The polity’s name derived from the claims of its rulers—elected as “kings of the Romans” and sometimes subsequently crowned “Roman emperors”—to be successors of Charlemagne and ultimately of antique Rome, and to be the defenders of the Catholic Church and Christendom. Debates continue about when exactly the “Holy Roman Empire” began. Both the 9th-century Carolingian and 10th-century Ottonian realms are contenders, although the Latin term sacrum Romanum imperium did not gain widespread currency until the 13th century. In the period c. 1300–1650, the focus of this bibliography, the Empire exhibited important differences from most other realms in Europe, notably in its elective system of monarchical succession, its residual claim to universal authority (to be co-exercised, in theory, with the papacy), and its exceptional fragmentation among increasingly autonomous principalities, bishoprics, lordships, and cities (often called “territories”). It also notionally housed emerging polities in their own right, such as the Swiss Confederation and the kingdom of Bohemia; their relationship with the premodern Reich remains a contentious historiographical issue. At the same time, it shared some basic characteristics with neighboring kingdoms, being a monarchy that governed in concert with an aristocratic community of estates at emerging representative institutions (the diets, or Reichstage, as they were known by around 1500), and a polity that came increasingly to be identified with a national community (the deutsche Nation). Recent decades have therefore seen lively debates about how the Empire ought to be defined and categorized, and how its “constitution” (Reichsverfassung)—or, in another idiom, its political culture—operated. While several ambitious long-term histories of the Holy Roman Empire have attempted to synthesize the unwieldy evidence, it is important to keep in mind the challenges of generalizing about such a large entity over many centuries. As well as exhibiting considerable diversity across space, the Empire changed substantially over time in several respects. A phase of dynastic competition in high politics before 1437 gave way to a near-monopoly of control over the imperial office by the Habsburgs thereafter. A “monistic” imperial government, theoretically coordinated top-down by monarchs, developed into a “dualistic” conception of power in which the imperial estates shared in governance via collective institutions. In some regions, a landscape of utterly fragmented and intertwined jurisdictions held by myriad competing actors was gradually replaced by more clearly defined and centralized territories arranged hierarchically under princely families. Finally, the division of the estates between Catholics and various Protestant confessions in the course of the 16th and early 17th centuries contributed both to calamitous conflict (the Thirty Years’ War) and to the reshaping of the imperial constitution to manage the new confessional configuration (the 1555 “Religious and Profane Peace” of Augsburg, the 1648 Treaty of Osnabrück). The long and rich tradition of regional history (Landesgeschichte) in the German-speaking lands has enabled these changes to be studied at the local as well as the central level, and recent scholarship has made clear that both perspectives are indispensable to understanding the Holy Roman Empire’s complex structures and dynamics.